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The Light of Reflection: Hawthorne and the Luminist Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Gayle L. Smith
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Extract

Several months after Hawthorne's “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” appeared in the January, 1838 Democratic Review, Elizabeth Peabody brought a copy to Emerson, who recorded in his journal the next day, “I complained that there was no inside to it.” Emerson's cool reaction notwithstanding, “Foot-prints,” along with a number of Hawthorne's other sketches and extended descriptions of nature, rewards much closer reading if we are interested in his complex aesthetic and philosophical responses to landscape. In fact, Hawthorne's depictions of nature reveal a particularly “inside” view, reflecting and inviting the meditative, contemplative response to nature articulated by Kant and embodied by the group of 19th-century American painters we now know as the luminists. His notebooks are filled with detailed descriptions of landscape, clouds, and light; some are almost specific enough to sound like painters' verbal sketches to be consulted later in the studio. While he frequently mentions Claude Lorrain and the picturesque tradition, his close attention to nature betrays a profound interest in elements that were to become the focus of the luminists in the 1850s and 1860s. Prolonged consideration of a landscape or seascape seems to lead Hawthorne significantly beyond the available, almost codified aesthetic of the picturesque to a way of representing nature and the individual's relationship to it that is more subjective, meditative, and open-ended. Hawthorne's later reactions to specific paintings, especially those of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, also suggest strongly that he would have found a far closer match to his sensibilities in many of the canvases of the luminists, especially Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, than those of his more immediate contemporaries, Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School painters.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 16 , October 1991 , pp. 171 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

NOTES

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47. McKinsey, , Niagara Falls, p. 202Google Scholar. She cites Cole Sketchbook no. 3, p. 143, Thomas Cole Papers, Detroit Institute of Arts, quoted in Glassie, Henry, “Thomas Cole and Niagara Falls,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 8 (04 1974): 92.Google Scholar

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52. Wilmerding, , “The Luminist Movement,” American Light, p. 120.Google Scholar

53. McKinsey cites Huntington, David C., The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: Braziller, 1966), pp. 65–66Google Scholar for the Ruskin quotation.

54. McKinsey, , Niagara Falls, p. 236Google Scholar. She cites the exhibition catalogue John Frederick Kensett, 1816–1872 (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1968), n.p.Google Scholar

55. Ferber, Linda S., “Luminist Drawing,” American Light, p. 252Google Scholar. Ferber here cites Hunt, 's Talks on Art, First Series (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896)Google Scholar, reprinted in Hunt, , On Painting and Drawing (New York: Dover, 1976), p. 64.Google Scholar

56. Powell, , “Luminism and the American Sublime,” American Light, p. 78Google Scholar. Here he cites Noble, Louis Legrand, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Vesell, Elliot S. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The first edition was published in 1853.

57. Hawthorne, Julian, Hawthorne and His Circle (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968), p. 153.Google Scholar

58. McKinsey, 's Niagara FallsGoogle Scholar includes photographs of Kensett's Niagara Falls at Amherst College on p. 236 and his Niagara Falls at the Denver Art Museum on p. 237.

59. McKinsey, , Niagara Falls, p. 247Google Scholar. See indicates (p. 317 n. 23) that the Church sketch is in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and is reproduced in Adamson, Jeremy Elwell's Ph.D. dissertation, “Frederic Edwin Church's ‘Niagara’: The Sublime as Transcendence” (University of Michigan, 1981, illustration no. 303).Google Scholar